Main Navigation

Paper: Using measurements to develop complex websites

If you are developing a complex website whose users will come to it to carry out complex tasks then you’re likely to want to use a range of data to support your decision-making.

This was the situation when I was helping the Open University develop the website used by enquirers to decide whether to sign up for a course of study. And it made an interesting case study for the first international conference on Human Centred Design – HCD 2009 – held in San Diego in July.

Our paper reported on the methods we used and the challenges of using measurements from usability testing, search log analysis and web traffic analysis to inform the website’s development. In particular we reported on:

an example of triangulating data taken from all three sources to help make design decisions;

an example of drawing on web analytics and search log analysis to inform our choices of tasks during a measurement usability evaluation

an example of using search log data to decide whether a new feature was worth investigating further.